Papers

Beck, D.
Beck Engineering
David Gilbert and Kevin Stacey
Compañía Minera Antamina S.A. Peru
Underground excavations are subjected to complex stress changes caused by nearby mining, but may also be affected by repeated dynamic loading from blasting and seismic events. In some cases, the combined, cumulative effects can lead to unforeseen damage, displacement and instability.
Simulating dynamic loading of an underground excavation is a very complex task. The state of rock mass stress, damage and deformation must first be simulated sufficiently requiring small scale structures to be explicitly...

Large deformations in deep mines occur due to the exposure of extensively damaged rock mass adjacent to an excavation. In order to properly simulate the support response in such conditions, the ground deformation must be captured accurately. The mechanisms of rock mass damage, dilation and deterioration must first be correctly simulated to produce a realistic tunnel deformation in three dimensions. Furthermore, the physical response of the support elements must be realistic.
In this paper, a multi-scale, discontinuum approach to mine deformation modelling has been described to improve the...

V. Levkovitch, F. Reusch, Beck Engineering, Germany
D. Beck, Beck Engineering, Sydney, Australia
The Mohr failure envelope for rock materials is a convex curve strongly dependent on the level of confinement and truncated at low normal stresses. The most commonly applied failure criterion – the Mohr-Coulomb criterion – matches the observed failure envelope poorly. Using this criterion it is not possible to accurately describe rock failure over the whole range of expected confinement conditions for many prob-lems and instead the engineer must choose parameters that will be applicable over...

Beck, D., Reusch, F., Beck Engineering, Australia
The assessment of slope stability does not frequently account for the interaction between stress, rock mass damage and water pressure and flow in a rigorous manner. Owing to improvements in computer capacity, it is now possible to undertake fully coupled or partially coupled, 3d hydromechanical Finite Element simulation of mines, including explicit representations of large numbers of discontinuities. The analysis requires fewer assumptions than uncoupled analysis or 2d analysis, but may require a change in how hydrological data is collected....

Beck, D., Beck Engineering
Sharrok, G., The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Capes, G., Newcrest Mining Limited, Orange, NSW, Australia
Coupled, granular flow-deformation simulations have been undertaken at a number of caving operations to simulate cave initiation, propagation and gravity flow. The tool combines a Newtonian Cellular Automata (NCA) representation of the cave
muckpile with an explicit Discontinuum Finite Element (DFE) model of the rock mass mine scale and incorporate high resolution input data such as large numbers of explicit structures in the rock mass and...